When she was gone, and I had walked the floor of that pretty room a full half-hour, as it seemed to me, I fell to wondering how her mere mention of the time could make the tall clock in the corner go on wagging its pendulum in sly malice while its hands made hours of the minutes. We speak of killing time: I could have wrecked that lying time-piece more than once, and was, I think, standing before it and shaking my fist in its brazen face, when I first heard the hesitant opening of the door.
No, it was not Mistress Margaret, coming back to tell me she had failed. It was Beatrix, and she had waited thus long so that she might curve her lip and train her eyes to flash and look me down, as I had seen her go and hide herself to do many a time when we were children together and had quarreled, as children will.
“Well?” she said, much as she had said it the night before, when she had come into the glass rose-house to make me think she despised me.
“I have come to bid you good-by,” I told her, picking out the most inane word that came to hand. And she would not let even that poor word stand.
“No,” she contradicted; “you came to bring a letter for Margaret. You came to fetch and carry for that dreadful man—as his lackey!”—and here the beautiful eyes burnt me, they were so indignant hot.
“I should have come anyhow,” I asserted. “But I was glad to bring Mistress Margaret her letter: that was a service to her rather than to Mr. Arnold.”
“Call him ‘General,’ Mr. Page; he is your general, isn’t he?” she scoffed.
“So he says, and so he thinks, and so I call him, when I have to. But you must not think, because I am wearing this coat, that I am over-proud of it, or of my service in what we have lately been calling the ‘Traitors’ Legion,’ on the other side of the Neutral Ground.”
“Then, why are you in it?” she demanded. “Why, why, why?”
“It is a long story,” I stammered, “and there is less time for telling it now than there was last night. But tell me; how is it that you are here in New York, when I thought you were safe in Virginia?”